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If you get a direct hit your radio is fried. Doesn't matter if it's a polyphasor or cheapy cheap. Close calls is where they do their work.

Use a Polyphaser arrestor with N connectors and grounded with least an 8 awg wire to the house earth ground. Don't screw around with cheap junk.

I was actually reading your thread while I was messing with mine and the SWR meter this morning. Seems I fared better than you with 3 out of 4 units working. I'm trying to file a warranty claim on the janky one (I assume they'll get back to me on Monday) since I'm outside of the Amazon return window. I'll probably hang onto mine and use them as loaners or something if I ever get nicer radios.

Thx for checking. The repeater listed in Prosper TX is down. Looking to hit a couple of others via Hustler mag mount on pizza pan. Will see that that does. If not, stick with Ham for repeater and distance stuff and use GMRS for 2 way radio stuff. Let’s see what the pizza plan can do! Thx again

Don't buy cheap Chinese Lighting Arrester's.. Like i did and learned the hard way..

My multimeter doesn't read out OL instead it reads out 0 but I get what you're saying, I'm replacing the coax all together. Yeah my run is 49 ft in total as my antenna is sitting on a 30ft tall mast (because of the terrain where I live.)

just a little bit of Trivia, if you look at the 'Stale' Repeaters most show expired Lic as well.. I know of two 'stale' repeaters in my area, the owners died years ago and obviously have no way to remove themselves ..

Oh, no. You’re not getting off that easy!

RG-213 has 5.28dB/70% loss at 100 feet and LMR-400 has 2.87dB/48% loss at 100 feet. The calculations were made using 50 watts in and an SWR of 1.5. You can get away with using RG-213 but LMR-400 will definitely work better. Cheaper alternatives to LMR-400 is DX Engineering 400MAX or R&L Electronics Jetstream 400Flex. As @nokones stated, stay away from the cheap stuff from Amazon and eBay. The cheaper stuff will have less ground shielding plus some use aluminum instead of copper shielding. You definitely won't get as good of a solder joint on your connectors with aluminum shielding, if you can even get the solder to stick to it.

Your multimeter continuity reading on the coax cable should be reading "OL" meaning no resistance. Your coax has an itty bitty short, that's not good. And more than likely it is at one of the connectors. If your coax run from the radio is more than 20 feet you should be using LMR400 coax that is purchased from a reputable radio electronics supply retailer and not from an operation that specializes in cheap discount inferior products.

LOL. Dear Sir, your contributions to this site more than make up for any beer deficit. Please consider the accounts balanced.

Agreed. I have mine hooked up to a DB-25G, but I've come to the same conclusion: Nice, cost-effective way to do GMRS. Simple, no holes to drill and highly portable (I move it inside atop a pizza pan when not in one of several vehicles). I'm a lightweight user and you are hard-core, but we both agree that the combo is a lot of GMRS for $150.

Two 25 ft lengths, sorry forgot to add that part.

I agree, so ive decided to just replace it with two length of RG213/U that should be sufficient I think.

Me too and I still owe you a beer!

I still don’t know what the length is, but rg213 still sucks for uhf.

The coax is less than six months old at this point, yes yhe connectors could be the issue. I am looking at just replacing it with two pre-made lengths of RG 213/U cable.

You don’t mention the lengths of your RG-58, but for UHF almost any length is too much, but lossy cable like RG-58 will always make your SWR appear artificially low because less forward power reaches the antenna than passes through the meter so there’s less power to reflect AND much less reflected power reaches the SWR meter after reflecting from the antenna. So although the losses in RG58 is a problem, it’s not the cause of your SWR reading higher. Second, although a short or an open can be detected by a multimeter, the effect of RF frequencies is completely different. Yes, detecting a short would be reason to discard a connector or a cable, but resistive losses, the 002 (I assume that’s 2 millions?) that you measured are nothing to worry about. Without a dummy load and antenna/coax analyzer or nanonva your best option is to simply remove a piece at a time, replacing it with a known good component.

My 4 non transmitting tdh3’s all receive exceptionally well. They work great on receive. FWIW.

Going to agree with Steve on this. Given everything other reply from OP it seems as though either the connector didn't go as well as thought (the multimeter test doesn't show as much as a VNA does) or something is wrong with the coax. Age of the coax? I may have missed this. How long has it been outside? Have you sealed the connectors against the weather? Almost sounds like the connectors are the source, but that is just from antenna building experience as when all else fails, it's almost always the connector.

The radios are sensitive enough to hear the local oscillator or using the wire to the antenna as an antenna. I'm betting all these units showing up like this have a wire not connected to the center pin of the antenna. I have a couple and eventually I will take one apart to see if it's as simple as a bad solder joint. Which is what I expect.

At least it's not water infected like mine got. I went from a 1.15 to a 2.08 and reception and transmission were affected substantially. Under 26ºF everything went good. As soon as it went over freezing it went bad. After the cold weather went away so did my reception and transmission. Replaced the bad antenna and coax section got swapped over to Heliax. Great stuff. Good luck with solving your issue. It's never fun when it happens and you can't figure out why.

@hxpx